Small town boy big world

PLAINS - Last week, a Plains born and raised son came home for a week to take a break from becoming a well-known creator in the video game, movie and commercial industry.

Matthew Williamson, who graduated from Plains High School in 2007, returned last week for a week long vacation after working in the movie, video game, and commercial industry as an illustrator.

Since leaving Plains after high school (2007), Williamson in a short period of time trained, learned and quickly made his way into large-scale illustration production.

“I’m an animator in visual effects currently. I’ve done animation for big video games and commercial studios and most recently I’ve been doing work for visual effects in movies,” Williamson explained over a phone interview.

The latest movie Williamson has worked on was the blockbuster, “Ant-Man.”

“I was one of two lead animators for just our studio, so I think there were four other studios that were contracted to do work for the film, but my team was 6 guys and the other lead had six guys. We had 12 altogether in our studio,” Williamson said.

Williamson explained that his career path started well within his adolescence. As an avid player of video games, he described fondly of how his love for them laid the foundations for becoming involved in their artistic creation.

“From a really young age I was obsessed with video games, like Mario on the Nintendo, and the later [games], like Playstation, Xbox, all that stuff, I was an avid gamer and would stay up all night so I could play those games,” Williamson said. He then went on to talk about how he studied video game development for eight months in Seattle, but learned it was not for him. From 2009 until 2011 he studied at the Art Institute of Vancouver in British Columbia to pursue animation.

In addition to “Ant-Man,” Williamson’s largest production was a video game called, “Playstation All Stars Battle Royale.”

Williamson explained the game. “That was a fighting game of all the lead characters from major Playstation Game Titles. I actually got to animate a ton of my childhood favorites...”

Not only being able to produce and see the end result of large scale productions he helped create, Williamson explained that in his field the whole process of illustrating is very rewarding.

“It’s really challenging, but I am always working with really smart people. From the technical side from like programming from engineering, from all the programs we use to just the fine artists that are in my studio, it’s really fun working with all those people,” Williamson said.

As of right now, the next big project for Williamson is a series of Christmas commercials for the shopping chain Target.